


Desperate Times

by eon_s



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Batman: Arkham - All Media Types
Genre: Bullying, Chaos, Cynical, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Eugenics, Gen, I think that's all the tags, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Torture, Inappropriate Behavior, Inappropriate Erections, Institutional Abuse, M/M, Medical Torture, Mental Institutions, Non-Consensual Electroconvulsive Therapy, One-Sided Attraction, Public Humiliation, Public Nudity, Sexual Harassment, Tarot, Theft, Urination, exploiting someone's mental illness for your own amusement, minor headcanons (seriously minor like what colour the joker's asshole is minor), oh wait i lied, passing mentions of chemical castration of a pedophile (tetch) and of medical abuses in the vein of, peeing on someone without their consent, the joker is not nice you have been warned, there im done
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:35:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26793739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eon_s/pseuds/eon_s
Summary: You have to make your own fun in Arkham. The Joker is particularly creative, in this department.(aka more depraved Joker-centric antics, one-sided batjokes, heavily inspired by 'that one scene' (you'll know the one when you read it, if the tags don't give it away) in Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth - because I can't help myself from writing these things.)
Relationships: Harvey Dent/Joker (DCU), Joker (DCU)/Bruce Wayne
Comments: 6
Kudos: 29





	Desperate Times

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for a fic like this really are just... read the tags. There's so much unhealthy shit going on here.
> 
> That said, because this is so heavily focused on AA: aSHoSE - the characterization of the Mad Hatter/Jervis Tetch as a pedophile is the one I'm referencing here in passing, and the Joker treats it with the same irreverence he treats everything else. So PLEASE heed the tags.
> 
> Also: I'm heavily inspired by AA: aSHoSe, as I said, but also to an extent by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, as well as accounts (both personal and through loved ones) about the mental health system in particular times and places. So if this comes off as cynical, it is. If it comes off as anti-medicine, it isn't, but it is anti the kind of 'quick fix' mental health care that promotes either drugging people into submission or (especially in previous eras) ECT-ing them into submission because holistic and systemic mental health care practices are too expensive for the State to get behind. (Think the 'chronic' versus 'acute' distinction in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, if you've ever read it.) 
> 
> Short-term treatments may work for the short-term mental health emergencies, but the kind of long-term psychiatric and therapeutic care someone like the Joker would need to actually improve would be super expensive and a very long process, and I can't see the State willingly doing more than just 'incarcerating and forgetting about it' in that case. I know someone who is currently institutionalized for a crime they committed while in a psychotic episode, and the government's response to this has been essentially to offer no treatment and to wash their hands of the situation once said person is 'off the street.' It's very out of sight out of mind.
> 
> tl;dr cynical mentally ill man writes cynical mentally ill fanfiction, i guess :I and i still should be working on academics and not writing about men pissing on each other, but yet again i've fallen into old habits

* * *

You have to make your own fun in Arkham.

This is a lesson you either learn quickly or don’t learn at all, and if you don’t learn it, then you’re destined for some really heavy sedation for the rest of your life, or possibly even the morgue by your own hand. The Joker learned quickly, of course – he’s nothing if not flexible – but he’s seen plenty of people come in too hopeless to adapt. Some get violent – lose their grip on the few remaining threads of sanity they have left. There’s sanity and then there’s sanity, see, and once you lose the last few bits you might as well not be sentient. Those ones wind up drugged past the point of no return, or ‘accidentally’ given too much ECT if they’re no one important enough for the State to come investigating into later – it’s cheaper to give their brains a quick flash-fry than to keep them swallowing tablets forever, after all.

The depressives invariably just get more and more despondent and boring until one day something pushes them over the edge and – finally – they _wake up_ long enough to off themselves. It’s usually pretty spectacular – all that desperation finally exploding into some last act of vengeance against the universe for putting them in it. They get so creative it’s really something special. They’ll find a way to snuff themselves out with nothing more than a bit of string or a smuggled utensil. Once, the Joker watched a man smash open his own skull in the middle of the rec room out of sheer determination, like he was cracking an egg. Funny, really, how they only get personalities in the last few seconds before their clocks run out. If they’d put that much energy into learning to embrace the madhouse, they’d be having too much fun to want to die – well, except for the really bad-off ones.

(If you’ve attempted to kill yourself more than four times and you’ve still failed to do it, you’re enough of a moron that the doctors should put you out of your misery themselves. Even if you get there eventually, you’ll only drag everyone else’s mood down every time you get their hopes up only to survive again. It’s for the greater good – which admittedly the Joker is no strict adherent to. Too many rules, not enough chaos – and what’s the world ever done for him anyway? Still, on that one point, he and the goosestepping docs agree.)

The Joker’s encountered his fair share of thinly veiled eugenics in the psychiatric system – everything from some forced sterilizations to the special cocktails of drugs they give the kiddie diddlers to keep them limp-dicked forever (as if that stops them! The Mad Hatter damn near wore a hole in his Alice doll after they all but feminized him on those pills – all the drugs did was grow him the kind of proto-tits he’d like to find on one of his underaged conquests. They had to ban him from the rec room because he kept rubbing his chest and it made all the patients who’d been their dear ol’ Daddy’s cock-warmers growing up see red and start a fight that left an orderly with broken fingers and an inmate missing an eye.) The memory is ridiculous – hilarious – the kind of curdled abortion that bureaucratic medicine inevitably gives birth to with their attitude of 'let's try to help everyone by sticking them all together out of sight and out of mind and letting them tear each other apart.'

The tangent’s getting away from him, but that’s part of the whole survival strategy. That’s part of do-it-yourself entertainment. You can only masturbate so long before you start getting lesions from the friction, and running out of memories of the Batman glowering at you. (Mastur- _bat_ -ing – oh, that’s just absolutely _too good._ File that one away for a rainy day, why don’t you?) Besides that, you can always barter with the orderlies – trade mouth-jobs for snacks – but there’s no amount of semen in the world that could make the two flavours of Jell-O and the wallpaper paste rice pudding palatable. (Anyway – the Joker’s got a figure to maintain.)

Beyond that, there’s not much else to do around a place like this. Asylums are all long doldrums of insufferable _nothing_ punctuated by the brief high of a short burst of ultraviolence every now and then. If you don’t find a way to make the boredom bearable – if you just keep sitting on your hands, waiting for that next high to come to you, you’ll start climbing out of your skin waiting for the penny to drop. (Well. You could also watch television like a smooth-brained chump, but that’s so far beneath the likes of the Clown Prince of Crime that he doesn’t even include it among the options.)

So – that’s what separates the men from the boys – when the usual distractions fail, the clever fellows put on their thinking caps and come up with alternatives to keep from going – heh – crazy.

The Joker’s latest scheme is a real doozy. A little crude, yes, but when they’ve taken your toys away you need to make the most of what you have. In an ideal world he’d be able to blow up the commissary or something, really get his blood pumping, but the killjoys on staff don’t let him have so much as a penknife these days.

Desperate – ha! – times call for desperate measures, as the old saying goes.

It’s remarkably easy to loiter by the water fountain and drink enough to drown a small child. One of the orderlies does ask what he’s up to, but he just plays innocent, fluttering his eyes with an _‘I’m so *thirsty*, mister,’_ and they quickly back off and leave him to his fun. After drinking until he gets a stomach cramp, it’s just a matter of waiting around and keeping his eyes peeled for his target.

Harvey ‘Walking-Disaster’ Dent, the blubbering idiot, clings to his pack of tarot cards like a lifeline. What a colossal monument to the failure of modern medicine – the supposed freedom of choice has become a jailer to ol’ Two-Face.

A sharp pang in his abdomen means it’s go-time, not to put too fine a point on it, so the Joker gets to his feet, nonchalant as anything, and wanders over to where Two-Face sits, shuffling cards.

“Trying to ask them if you can go to the toilet?” he sneers, grin splitting his whole face wide as a canyon. Two-Face – Harvey – jumps at the sudden intrusion and drops his deck. He falls to his knees, stricken, frantic. Feigning kindness, the Joker joins him, helping him gather every stray piece of paper.

“Justice, huh? That’s rich…”

He’s momentarily distracted by the card. Some little twink waving a sword about – really – had the illustrator never _seen_ the Batman? A shudder suddenly ripples through him and he remembers what he’s meant to be doing.

“I think I’ll keep this. I’ve always said it’d be handy to have the law on my side, for once.”

The Joker hasn’t got any pockets – Heaven forbid they leave you with anywhere but your rectum to store a damned shiv – so he slips off his elasticated slipper-sock – _State-issued! –_ and places the card there, face up. He’ll step all over that little twink-king’s face, see how he likes it! People _pay_ for _that kind_ of justice in some parts of town.

“Hey! I need that – g-give it back!”

Harvey looks terrified, his precious card gone forever, one choice down.

“I don’t see why you’re so sour about it. What if I took the whole deck off your hands – left you with card to do with as you please. Read it right-side up, you get to eat today. Read it reversed, it’s hunger strike time. Wouldn’t that feel more like home, _dollface?_ Like your precious _coin?_ So mean of the doctors to take it away – what _spoilsports!_ ” the Joker cackled.

“That’s not – I don’t think –”

“Oh, don’t have a conniption. I don’t want your stupid deck. I’ve got _bigger_ things on my mind.”

The Joker draws out the word ‘bigger’ in tandem with hooking a thumb ‘round the drawstring waist of his pants and tugging them out of the way. He exposes himself casually, all emerald bush and lily-white all-together – looking like a girthy peppermint stick.

“You know,” he remarks idly, “I used to resent that they didn’t give me a razor, but I’m starting to think I look nice set against a dark background. My balls could do with a waxing, though. What do you think?”

“What the hell are you doing?” Dent hisses, alarmed, but frozen (predictably) to the spot. He can’t leave – can’t shuffle his deck fast enough to get out of there.

“Oh, don’t get your panties in a twist. I’m not going to poke you with it.”

Plain as day, with relaxed movements designed to hide in plain sight from the orderlies, the Joker thumbs back his foreskin, revealing his pretty pink head – one of the few places (along with his asshole and the inside of his mouth) not bleached white by his little _accident_ at Ace Chemicals. He aims and lets go – takes a minute; he’s thankful Harvey’s such a beached whale and unable to wriggle out of the way – and an arc of near-clear piss curves out of him, hitting the knee of Harvey’s Arkham-issued trousers. He flinches back, alarm and fury warring on his mess of a face.

**_“What the fuck –”_ **

“Ah, Two-Face – out to play at last?” the Joker snorts, and tilts his cock so that he soaks a broad track up the other man’s thigh, stopping at his lap, which he blasts with enthusiasm. The orderlies still haven’t noticed a thing. Harvey – Two-Face – he’s certainly noticing. The Joker notices him noticing and has to bite his lip to keep from laughing loud enough to bring the whole administration down upon him.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have! Is that for me? Why, I feel like the luckiest girl in the world!”

He shifts his hips, running his piss across the erection forming in those – increasingly translucent; the State really doesn’t want to shell out for thick fabric – pants.

“S-Stop it!”

“Naughty, naughty Harvey! What a filthy boy you are! I had no idea you were such a little slut.”

“I’m – it’s because –”

“Oh, whoops! Looks like the well’s run dry,” the Joker pouted, shaking himself off as the last few drops of urine dribble onto the rec room floor. “Guess that’s all for today.”

He then gasps loudly in disgust, and flings himself back a few feet, recoiling.

“Nurse! Oh, Nu-urse! He’s done it again! Harvey’s pissed himself – we really oughta put that boy in diapers!”

The ensuing chaos is as delicious as he figured it would be. Harvey is humiliated, trying to plead his case, all that legal training falling on deaf ears. Two-Face flickers to the surface long enough to shout a death threat at the Joker – which promptly gets him grabbed bodily and hauled out of the rec room. As he passes, the Joker discretely steps on the hem of one pant-leg, tugging the elasticated waist down just enough for his erection to come bobbing out. With his arms behind him, he can only struggle and try to close his legs to keep the eyes off him. He spits curses and violence – still comically hard and wet.

The Joker, lounging against the wall, grins and grins until one of the orderlies – arriving with a mop and bucket, narrows his eyes at him.

“What’s that look for?”

“Why, nothing, sir! Nothing at all!”

He chuckles and peels himself off the wall, hands clasped behind his back, and whistles as he retreats to his cell, dropping one hand to his lap to rub himself, amused and aroused by the deviant little trick he’s gotten away with. It doesn’t take much – just a few pulls and he’s dripping. He takes the card out of his shoe and butts the head of his penis up against it, painting that placid, androgynous face, and he can almost imagine it – the Batman, staring up at him from a static, printed page, avatar of justice, like a saintly icon or a glossy-bright advertisement, as he pulses thick globs of little Joker juniors all over those thin, grimacing, stoic lips.

You have to make your own fun in Arkham. The Joker’s pretty good at doing exactly that.


End file.
